Screw Communism

January 30, 2008

Cristian Mungiu’s superb and upsetting film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which
captured the Palme d’Or last year at Cannes
and went into U.S.
release last week, may present a similar quandary for the right-to-life
movement. The story of a young Romanian woman and her friend who suffer
unspeakable ordeals as one of them seeks an abortion, it takes place in 1987
when Ceausescu still held sway and the procedure was a serious crime. You might
say Mungiu has depicted what happened to Romanians when they fucked during
communism and didn’t take precautions.

The film is, by implication, decidedly pro-choice. It paints
a gruesome picture of an oppressive regime and the inhumane consequences for
everyone involved when abortion is branded illegal. These Romanian women don’t
behave like the title character in Juno,
an American teenager who also becomes pregnant by accident but chooses instead
to give her baby up to an infertile yuppie couple.

Adoption is not an option discussed in 4 Months. And no wonder, given what has been widely reported about
abhorrent conditions inside Romanian orphanages. The fate of the country’s many
unwanted babies has been wrenchingly documented in photographs by James
Nachtwey and in films such as Edit Belzberg’s Children Underground (2001).

Romania’s
legal history vis-à-vis abortion was for many years the inverse of America’s. To
raise birth rates Ceausescu in 1966 enacted his notorious State Decree No. 770--it ruled abortion illegal for any
woman under 45 who had not yet produced four children--just as the procedure was
being decriminalized by U.S.
state legislatures and courts, culminating in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. With the fall of communism, one of
the first acts of the Romanian transitional government was to repeal the
statutes against abortion--with the result that it now has by far the highest
rate in Europe (78 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 as of 1996).

The 40-year old Mungiu, whom
I spoke to during the New York Film Festival last fall, sees his film as less about abortion than “about friendship and what you
would do for someone else.” Even though it is nothing if not a “women’s
picture,” he downplayed any feminist message. “Abortion is not a male or female
issue,” he said. Nonetheless, he couldn’t deny the film’s political
ramifications.

Born in Lasi, the former Moldavian capital, Mungiu lived
under the ban for the first 21 years of his life. Before setting to work on the
screenplay, he interviewed abortionists (“to make sure I wasn’t talking
nonsense”) as well as friends and crew members. To bring the actors closer to
the era, he brought in a group of women who had performed or undergone the illegal
act. “These women are still very cynical,” he said. “They didn’t show any moral
judgment. They talked clinically, like doctors.”

There was speculation, because the film is set in Mungiu’s
home town, that a creepy abortionist, played by Vlad Ivanov, was based on a
real person. On its release in Romania
last summer the press identified several supposed real-life models. But,
according to Mungiu, the figure is a composite. “When we began to shoot the
film, we discovered that everybody on the set had a story like this,” he said.
“One of the fellows behind the camera told us about his wife who had an
abortion on her kitchen table.”

After the Romanian screening, women approached him and
related one horrifying story after another. There was the fiancee who became
pregnant and was promptly dumped by her husband-to-be before the wedding. “It
was inconceivable to have a child out of wedlock then, as difficult as having
an abortion,” he said. She was lucky to find someone in a tiny village who
agreed to do it. “He took her to the basement and showed her two large jars,
one of water and the other of acid. He said that it the procedure went well,
the fetus would go in the water. If it didn’t, he would put her in the acid and
no one would ever know what had happened to her.”

Money and class determined access to abortions under
Communism as well as elsewhere. A Bulgarian visa was highly coveted because it
allowed access to the procedure. Romanians scammed birth control pills from Hungary or USSR. But in the final days of the
regime, as the restrictions against abortion intensified, government officials
would go into factories and subject female workers to gynecological exams in
order to register which women were pregnant. “To make sure they didn’t leave.”

Mungiu had to help his two lead actresses, Anamaria Marinca
and Laura Vasiliu, with the history they were recreating. Both young women had
a hard time imagining the sacrifices their characters are called on to make in
the film. “I had to talk with them a lot about how difficult it was to survive
then, because this was not something they would do,” said Mungiu. “People tend
to forget now that nobody expected communism would come to an end.”

After 4 Months, 3
Weeks, 2 Days won the Palme d’Or, Mungiu became a national hero. Despite
its portrayal of Romania
as squalid and corrupt, the film sold 50,000 tickets in four weeks and topped Ratatouille at the box office. There are
only 35 cinemas in the entire country, however, so Mungiu fundraised over the
summer and organized a caravan that has been touring the film to remote cities
and towns. No matter their politics or
their histories, Mungiu’s fellow Romanians can’t do what the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences inexplicably did only last week: pretend that one of
the best films of 2007 doesn’t exist.